So tonight we are here to remember Jesus’s last supper with his disciples. For me, it’s sort of another thing that always takes me by surprise during this Holy Week, because I am so used to having a celebration the Holy Eucharist every Sunday, it’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that this meal only happened once while Jesus was on earth, I always feel like it must have been happening every week, like we do in our churches! Now quite obviously Jesus shared many meals with people, tax collectors, Pharisees, with his disciples, but this meal is different, very unique and very sacred. First of all, it is Jesus’s farewell to his friends, his last happy moment in this life, so it’s already very special, and then it turns into something quite extraordinary. Paul summarizes this in the short passage we have just read in the letter to the Corinthians with the words we now hear every week in the Eucharistic Prayer: Jesus blesses the bread and he lifts the cup, declares them to be his body and blood given for us, and he invites his disciples to eat and drink in remembrance of him.
Now something we need to know is that this very meal Jesus and the disciples shared on that night was already very special and very sacred for all the Jews – it wasn’t any kind of meal, it was a Passover meal, a meal the Jews celebrated (and still celebrate) each year in remembrance of their deliverance from slavery in Egypt, in remembrance of their Exodus – our first reading. The Hebrews believed that on that night, they had been spared death of their first born (the last plague) and then liberated towards the promised land because they had been protected by the blood of the lambs they had sacrificed in obedience to God. And now Jesus is offering his own body, his own blood, his life for the Passover of all the people towards a new promised land, not a physical land, the promised land of Eternal life. So that’s why we often say, especially during the time around Easter, that Jesus is the lamb of God, and that we eat his Passover when we receive the Holy Eucharist.
It’s interesting to remember the tradition of the Jews when we think about the Eucharist, because what they did during the Passover meal is that they actually drank from four cups of wine at different times, and the cup Jesus chooses to become the cup we now all drink from was called by the Jews the cup of blessings, or the cup of Redemption. If you were here on Sunday, you may remember Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane right before he was arrested, when he said to the Father he accepted to take the cup of wrath, the cup of sorrows, this cup that symbolizes all our pain since our sin has separated us from God. Jesus is going to drink this cup of sorrows to the full, while he leaves us, instead, a cup of blessings, a cup of Redemption that brings us reconciliation with God. This is of course quite mysterious, we’ll talk more about it tomorrow for Good Friday, but we see that an exchange takes place: Jesus takes the curse, he takes our sorrows, and offers us instead blessings and Redemption. He is the lamb of God, we say when we celebrate the Eucharist, and then we add: the one who takes away the sin of the world.
Now how do we receive this gift? The words we have just heard in this passage of Corinthians are quite clear: To receive it we just need to accept it, not by nodding our heads but by eating and drinking. We just have to accept the gift. It’s important to be reminded of that because most people think that to be a Christian, you have to be a loving person – and I would say, well, yes, that would be the expectation. But that’s not the first thing we need to do. The first thing we need to do is to accept to be loved. We have to accept to be loved and not just the version of ourselves we show to the world, but the one hidden under the surface, and we talked a bit about that one Sunday as well, about about the self who bears the cup of sorrow, weariness, disappointments, shame, guilt, fear, anxiety. If we want Jesus to take away our pain, to take away our sin, we have to let him touch our pain and to let him see our sin. I think that’s what John is teaching this Gospel we have just heard, when Jesus says to Peter: Unless I wash you, you have no share with me. It was never about dirty feet. I don’t think Jesus worried a lot about dirty hands or dirty feet. But to join the meal of Redemption, Peter has to learn to let Jesus love him, and again not the acceptable version of himself, but the one who hurts, has been hurt and hurts others. Peter says You will never wash my feet because it’s so hard to let our hurting selves be loved by God. A year ago, I did a funeral for a family, three siblings who had lost their elderly Mom. I remember approaching one of the siblings asking him his name and he said his name and then added: I am the ugly one. I remember that because it really broke my heart to hear someone referring to oneself as “the ugly one”, when all I could see was someone who was hurting. I think this how God sees us: Not as the ugly ones, but as the ones who hurt, in so many different way. Some have said that what God wants to do more than anything is to save us from ourselves. Sometimes we really are our worst enemies.
And yet, when we start accepting to receive love, that’s really when we can drink the cup of blessings and share it with one another. Jesus says: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should love one another. Talking about “the cup of sorrows”, theologian Henri Nouwen says that our cup of sorrows can become a cup of blessings when we let God love us, when we share our sorrows with one another, when we help each other, serve each other, comfort each other. He says that the core of our suffering may not be so much the bad things that can happen to us, but the loneliness we experience when going through difficult things. Nouwen used to minister in a house for people with mental disabilities and he said that the suffering was intense but so was the love between people who were all very devoted to take care of one another, “washing each other’s feet” in the language of John’s Gospel. Nouwen says that when we let ourselves be loved, we learn trust, and from trust comes gratitude and from gratitude comes joy.